Wednesday, 27 February 2013

‘A woman who fucks
an octopus’ – that was the way Andrzej Żuławski pitched his 1980 film
Possession to the producer, fresh after the success of his French film L'important c’est d’aimer, about a fallen actress, played by a sad-eyed Romy Schneider, who is made to act in pornographic movies, surrounded by
other failed artists, including an unusually melancholic, tender performance from
Klaus Kinski. He was also right after the fiasco of his three hour long monumental metaphysical SF On a Silver Globe (1978), an adaptation of a fin de siecle experimental futurological novel of his great uncle, Jerzy Żuławski, pulled before completion by the hostile communist ministry of culture and shelved until 1987, when only Zulawski had a chance to "finish" the film. Around that time, he was abandoned by his wife Malgorzata Braunek, actress in his Third part of the night and The Devil, due to his famously domineering and possessive personality as a partner and a director. Left in shock and depression, he started plotting a mysogynist fairy tale about a monster....

The sleep of
reason produces demons, and one of them materialised, when Anna, living in West
Berlin with her functionary nice husband and child in a neat, 3 storeys blocks
estate, realised she despised her husband. She confesses that to him. The rest is what happens after that confession.

Possession was
made in the golden era of the genre of exploitation, and it must be due to the
communal genius that things conceived as forgettable shlock to this day shine
with a magnificent mixture of the visceral and the metaphysical, with
cinematography, colours, costumes and set design taken from a masterpiece.
Argento and the lesser gialli creators,
Jean Rollin with his erotic horror, the expansion of an intellectual SF, started
and inspired Tarkovsky, all paved the way for Possession, a still unrivalled
study of a marital break-up, thrown in the middle of political turmoil in
divided cold war Berlin. Still, Possession had a special “career” in the UK, if by career we understand horrible reception, extremely negative reviews and eventually putting it to the ‘video nasties’ list of banned films. “Film nobody likes”, it was deemed too arty for the flea pits and too trashy and vulgar for the art house.

Today perhaps we
can’t imagine what it was like to live in a city surrounded by barbed wire and
under a constant look of armed guards. When we first see Anna, played by a disturbingly
pale, un-Holy Mary-like Adjani and Mark (Sam
Neill), we instantly see something is terribly wrong: their windows are under
constant scrutiny, and surrounded by wire – the symbol of political oppression
just as of the marital prison, of conventional life.

Mark’s job is not
what it seems – he has completed a secret government mission, which he wants
nothing to do with anymore. Meeting with mysterious grey-suited men, it’s clear
he's involved in high rank espionage. Anna can’t explain what is driving her
towards the mysterious lover. She wears her deep blue, up-to-neck gown of a 19th
century governess, which walks her through all kinds of atrocities as if
untouched, as if it’s a secret armor.

The Berlin U-bahn
is a character in its own right, scene of her neurotic commutes to the fatal
flat on another end of Kreuzberg, again, by the wall, with screaming dramatic
graffiti: FREIE WEST and MAUER MUST GO (despite location in the east, it was
still included in the West), and in its underpasses is the most terrifying
scene of her possession, where she issues green-yellow gunk among terminal gargles. In all this there's a place for comic relief: the whole
character of lusty Margie, played by one of iconic RW Fassbinder’s actresses Margrit
Carstensen and her comical enormous leg in plaster, just as her failed courtship
of Mark; in one of Zulawski's turns of surreal genius, when a stupor-ridden Adjani is on the tube, she's
robbed of a bunch of bananas by a homeless man, who takes one and gently puts
the rest back to her bag. Luxury goods were an issue in the East, mind you.

The demon can be
many things: her anxieties, her neuroses that took the shape of an
evil monster. The monster can be also simply a misogynistic punishment for the
unfaithful Zulawski’s wife. A chronically decaying demon, built out of corpses,
can be also a sum of the traumas his generation had to go through. It is common
to say of JG Ballard that everything he ever written, wore the shadow of the scenes
he saw in a concentration camp in war-ridden Shanghai. Similarly, it is believed of Roman
Polanski, that all his films, revolving around pain, trauma, sickly sexuality
and claustrophobia, reveal the daily atrocities he saw as a child in the Cracow’s ghetto. There’s
no doubt Zulawski also went through traumatic childhood experiences, motives of which he obsessively came back to throughout all his career: war, isolation, madness realising in taboo eroticism, violence, evisceration, Polish romanticisme fou and our tragic history. Born in Lvov, Ukraine (then Poland) in 1940, he barely
survived the war, witnessing the destruction of the city and his family at a
very early age. In Possession we observe a growing hostility of the spouses, a decay of the family, of the city, and of the world.

Most of Zulawski’s
and some Polanski’s films, like Repulsion, Cul de Sac, Locataire (The Tenant),
all associate eroticism with perversion and anomaly, and fetishism, in a
genuinely surrealist way. Sex is creepy, sex involves an exchange of ugly
secretions, preceding of our inevitable decay; in fact, sex is a delight in
revulsion, in humiliation, in turning to rot, to a corpse, an acceptance not only of dying, but
also of dying disgustingly.

Also, due to the
amusing, pretty-ugly soundtrack of Andrzej Korzynski (rereleased recently, significantly, by English afficionados), the tale gains the feel
of deceit and malice and of a childish game at once: music is here at the same
time parodic and deadly serious. Korzynski had a longstanding relation to two Polish directors: the great Andrzej Wajda and to Zulawski, which can be
compared to the greatest director-composer couples in cinema: Leone-Morricone, Argento-Goblin/Morricone,
Fellini and Rota. In Third Part of the Night it was more art and free rock and prog - a bricoleur, it's clear he was taking from wherever he could. Some of his musique concrete experiments are also perhaps due to the influence of Polish Radio Experimental Studio (featured a lot before on my blog), and people like Wlodzimierz Kotoński. In Possession, he takes
those typically romantic styles, like tango or waltz, and turns them upside down;
similarly, he takes a children’s ditty motif, played on a broken harpsichord,
and twists it with sardonic, scary undertones, like a parody of a cheap Hollywood film noir. Every romantic illusion, fantasy of a
nice, unproblematic life, must be turned upside down and rear its disgusting head to us in the end. The
motifs come back on a loop, signifying the hopeless routine, in which the life
of Mark and Anna has hung, and how terrible the way out of it must be.

Anna’s ‘nymphomania’ can be also explained by her lack of orgasm. The whole film revolves around
her lack of pleasure, or in general, woman's incapability to get an orgasm from
the men that surround her. her craving for the beast is a typical freudian case of women's narcissism grew out of imprisonment and solitude (much like the aristocrat in Borowczyk's Beast, who also craved a monster as a source of unbelievable ecstasy). 'Almost' we hear from Anna each time she has sex
with her husband, with a tragic facial expression, typically, almost feeling
sorry for him, not for herself. Woman blames herself for the lack of
orgasm, never her lover. Neill is in his role often disarmingly, charmingly naive: he's chasing his wife, this woman, whom he doesn't understand a bit, always several steps behind her, disoriented. I'm sure this way Zulawski wanted to suggest who is in fact the vulnerable sex, cheated by the deceitful womanhood. As a proof of that, we have also Anna's double, their son's teacher, like in many other films (Third part of the night), replacing the (dead) Anna, who's less demanding in bed.

Anna is
disintegrating, her self being gradually possessed by demons: with her body
becoming lifeless like a marionette, sleepwalking through the besieged city,
unable to control, shaken by one shrill after another, obsessed with bodily
mutilation (never has an electric knife and kitchen automat meant so much in
the marital drama). She’s breeding her monster on her neurosis, guilt and
repulsion (like Catherine Deneuve keeping a dead rabbit in the fridge in
Polanski's eponymous film). I always actually thought monster is primarily an idea, Anna's punishment that turns into flesh. A fallen from grace housewife and mother, living on
sex like a vampire lives on blood, driven to madness by the increasingly mad
Berlin, Anna falls out of her previous gender roles, challenges all the cliches of a woman of her class or position and mocks the spectacle. The only healthy products
she keeps in her fridge now are the macabre heads and body-parts of her victims.
It’s a story of a woman who stops controlling herself: stops controlling her
libido (then of course she must fail as a mother), stops controlling her mind
(madness ensues), then stops controlling her body – and then her fluids start
to flow freely regardless of decorum: a dress is torn, a woman fucks an
octopus, a woman expels vomit, yellow prenatal waters and finally the foetus,
shaken, in a shocking scene, through all her orifices.

And then there’s the characteristic
claustrophobia of all the interiors, as if the closeness of the eastern border
and the restriction by the wall, especially felt in Kreuzberg district, caused
a specific Island Fever mentality (Insellkoller). Polanski’s Locataire
(together with Last Tango in Paris and Possession forming a great trilogy about the madness induced by the claustrophobic bourgeois tenements), tells a
story of a man growingly assuming the identity of a previous female tenant, who
killed herself (it’s also starring Adjani against her emploi as an
unattractive, bespectacled woman who grows friendly with Polanski’s character).
Similarly, Anna’s monster belongs to the insalubrious, skanky place of their
love, feeding on as on the negative aura surrounding the place, just like the blood
and the headless bodies she brings him. Zulawski had a proper budget behind him, so it is funny and telling, that the beast was made by the special FX specialist Carlo Rambaldi, known mostly for his outstanding work for Ridley Scott's Alien (as well as Argento's Profondo Rosso then he went on to model the little body of E.T., amazingly) and it would be tempting to compare Alien in Possession because of the role of women in it and in many other ways.

The glass-blue eyes of Isabelle Adjani
seem to tell the truth beyond recognition, beyond understanding…She knows that
the only way through the cold war of Europe
and of her own marriage is to live it, become like them: crazy.

All this to the accompaniment of the melody
of sardonic music box, deriding the characters. The queasy, sickly and morbid ditty, it owes a lot to Polish Jazz and Komeda’s
deliberately frantic note and soundtracks to
Lenica and Borowczyk’s animated films, House or Labyrinth, or Polanski’s Cul de
Sac with its fucked up little organ melody in a false key, just as the cheap soundtrack to horror movies. They all belong to
something that could be called a Polish surrealist tradition, similar to the
experimental Czech cinema.

But it's synth drivennes is another issue entirely, taking from the italo disco frenzy of the era, Giorgio Moroder's Munich Machine.

The genius of
Possession is that it's at least three films at once. On the surface it is a
horror movie, if slightly metaphysical, a giallo with images terrifying beyond
comprehension, with a monster, cannibalism, blood, forbidden sexuality, macabre
murders, corpses etc. On another level it is a marital break-up drama, much in
the style of many Bergmans, like Scenes from a Marriage or From the Life of Marionettes,
with spouses self-harming, hurting and humiliating each other. But that still
wouldn’t explain why they act the way they act, at least if we won’t accept the
rule of exploitation: there's no rules, and a plot of no plot. Here, a plot
there definitely is, and it develops with the inevitability of Greek tragedy.
Because another level of this drama is a political movie, set in the key city
of international secret services and a scene of ideological war. Anna and Mark
may live the relatively privileged life of Berlin expats, in their nice low rise
modernist flat, but are still subject to increasing alienation and isolation, harrassed
by men of mystery in ridiculous pink socks.

Trouble with
sexuality pervades the whole film – woman's sexuality, the murder of a
homosexual couple, Anna's previous lover ridiculed as an amateur of tantric sex
and martial arts, and all this finalizing in a third world war-verging plot. Early 1980s were the era of a 'second cold war' entering a new
phase, a nuclear crisis which could lead to 3rd WW, implied by the
final carnage between the secret services and the aftermath. Extremely theatrical, like a lot of the rest of the film, it's very
much in the 'postmodern' style of the French Neobaroque. To me, Possession is one
of the most prophetic movies for the 1980s, predicting the Polish Martial Law
of the 1981 (it premiered a few months before) and the great depression that followed.

Zulawski's genius was to
see the personal drama as political, and the visceral and the sexual as coming
from the social and political oppression. Incredibly stylish, modern, haunted with
beauty and austerity, it's a world torn between Marx and Coca-cola (with Anna
in one scene smashing the portraits of the classics of Marxism) and Zulawski is
not necessarily a Marxist. The choices of many in that generation, and later -
which they made as soon as capitalism entered Poland - wore serious traces of
reacting over a trauma. Still, Zulawski remains a Romantic: revealing that love
is the darkness, against the common, desexualized, sanitized convictions within
capitalism.